Day 28: For Everything There is a Season…
Summer changes to fall… Football seasons kicking off… Hunting season… Back to school… Seasons every place you look.
Life can make more sense when you think about it in terms of seasons as opposed to years.
Of course, you can talk about things that happened when you were 21, 5 or 6, or when you turned 30, but if you notice, a lot of times, life doesn’t neatly divide itself along the arbitrary dates of your birthday and the New Year. Usually, the big things happening in our lives bleed across those lines.
When we talk about seasons of our lives, they don’t have to be as neatly defined as seasons in other things. Sometimes the nature of the season lends itself to easy definition, other times, when the season is over you just know it.
For example, some easy seasons to define: pregnancy (either in one 9-month period, or if you break it down into trimesters), semesters in school, or times of unemployment. Harder ones to define might be seasons of grieving, or a season where you learn something about yourself or something else that you didn’t realize you learned until it was over. Seasons can be like that.
For me, this 30 Days has been a season. A season of transition. Looking back over the last 4 weeks, I am so incredibly thankful that I ran across this concept while wasting time on Twitter and even more thankful that God’s given me the perseverance to make it this far with the end just days away. This season of transition has been one of the more influential ones in my life, and I pray that it’s prepared me to be a better man. It’s taught me a lot about the importance of good habits at least, and I’ll be making every effort to carry those beyond this 30 Days,
This season has also inspired me to think about life in smaller, more manageable chunks, rather than the huge year-long period associated with New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve been able to accomplish a few things, however minor that I didn’t think possible within such a limited time period and that’s opened my eyes to what can be accomplished with determination and the willingness to risk failure.
What season are you in right now? If you’re not sure, put your phone down, take a step back, and think about where you’ve been and what you’ve learned in the last few days, weeks, months. Maybe you won’t be able to clearly discern the season of your life, but you’ll be thinking… thinking… an ever-increasingly uncommon act in this busy, frenetic world where much of what we do seems to be a reaction to the ever-increasing demands of life.
And maybe the clarity you get from that will help you get away from your phone even more each day and closer to the people around you. Let’s be real — you, me, all of us: we spend way too much time on those things, we’re staring at our hands for connection while people around us are desparately reaching out looking for love.
If you take anything away from anything that I’ve written in the last 28 days, consider what can happen when you examine your life honestly and ruthlessly, without making excuses for yourself. What you can do for the people around you, yourself, God, whoever, if you are just willing to make a few changes, do a couple new things each day.
We can’t control the seasons on this earth, but we do have at least some control in the actions we take that can start or end seasons in our own lives.
It might be autumn now, but the time is always right for spring in your life.
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Quote of the Day
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.~Ecclesiastes 3
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Links to Past Episodes/Resources:
Introduction Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10
Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15 Day 16 Day 17 Day 18 Day 19 Day 20
Day 21 Day 22 Day 23 Day 24 Day 25 Day 26 Day 27
Manfield’s Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self
If you have any feedback, please send me a message or leave it on my Facebook page: Thirty Days. This is a new project and I’d love to hear your thoughts. It is a tremendous encouragement to know that someone is reading this. Encouragement, comments AND criticism are welcome.
